What We are Reading – Page 6 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Good OM Reading: Inside Apple

In my first job out of college, I worked at McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) in St. Louis as an engineer on the design team for the F-4 Phantom jet fighter. Secrecy was pervasive and I proudly wore my badge with a green dot, meaning “high security” clearance. We were searched coming in and going out daily. But I was always envious of the engineers with the coveted black dot, which was “Top Secret” clearance. They never spoke to us, and operated out of a locked/secure room just 15 feet from my desk. Their project was the F-15 fighter. Black dotters were not even permitted to leave the US without special permission.

Maybe that’s why Adam Lashinsky’s new book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works, caught my eye. Apple is surely one of the most scrutinized companies in the world. Just last week, the New York Times ran two front page exposes about Apple’s supply chain and the mistreatment of workers at plants in Asia (see our recent blogs). All companies have secrets, of course, and Apple is not much different from McDonnell Douglas. Like in the defense industry, some areas are even more secret than others. But at Apple everything is a secret. The famous industrial design lab at Apple is so restrictive that few employees have ever seen inside its doors.

This quote provides some insight: “For new recruits, the secret keeping begins even before they learn which of these building they’ll be working in. Despite surviving multiple rounds of rigorous interviews, many employees are hired into dummy positions. The new hires have not yet been indoctrinated, and aren’t necessarily to be trusted with information as sensitive as their own mission. ‘They wouldn’t tell me what it was,’ remembered a former engineer.”

This book is an enjoyable inside look at a great company that doesn’t even permit an organization chart to exist.

Good OM Reading: How the US Lost iPhone Production

Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times’ (Jan.22,2012) lead article tells the story of Steve Jobs speaking at a Silicon Valley dinner in front of President Obama. Obama interrupted Jobs to ask :”What would it take to make iPhones in the US”? In the 1980s, Jobs had boasted that his Mac computer was “a machine made in America”. Today, almost all 70 million iPhones, 30 million ipads, and 59 million other Apple products are made overseas. Jobs’ answer to the Obama question was unambiguous: “Those jobs aren’t coming back”.

If you are teaching OM to a class of MBAs, the lengthy piece will make for great class discussion. It has a bit of every OM topic in our text, from supply chains, to global competition, to ethical issues regarding employee treatment, to manufacturing technology.

Apple has benefited the US economy in many ways, says one company exec. But he adds that curing unemployment is not Apple’s job. “Our only obligation is making the best products available”. Despite the 43,000 Apple employees in the US and 20,000 overseas, almost all 700,000 of the workers making Apple products work for Apple contractors in Asia and Europe.

Apple execs say going overseas is the only option. They tell the story of how the firm relied on a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the product was due on shelves. The last-minute redesign (a Jobs idea) forced an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers from their company dorm beds. Each employee was give a biscuit and a cup of tea and started 12-hour shifts to fit the new screens into frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones/day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking” says an Apple exec.

For Tim Cook, the new CEO, and architect of outsourcing production, the focus is “Asia supply chains have surpassed what’s in the US. The result is we can’t compete at this point”.

Good OM Reading: Rethinking Manufacturing Strategy

The latest MIT Sloan Management Review’s (Winter,2012) article “Is It Time to Rethink Your Manufacturing Strategy” is a great piece to use as you start your new semester. It opens with this line: “For the past 10 years, China was the answer to many manufacturing questions. That’s no longer automatically the case”.

It seems that supply chain disruptions, fuel price jumps, rising labor costs in China, advances in technology, and being closer to customers are leading manufacturers to conclude they may be better off with a regional strategy that may not include China. This doesn’t necessarily mean more jobs for the US, as Mexico is a potential regional site, just as Eastern Europe is an alternative to Western Europe. But it does mean that optimal manufacturing strategy must include raw materials, the product itself, and the location of the customer base.

While long supply lines were economically feasible 15 years ago because of cheap oil, transportation costs have risen, which has given rise to these 3 new cost-optimization realities:

1. Regional distribution centers have become more attractive as companies add warehouses to minimize distance between DCs and retail outlets.

2. Sourcing may need to move closer to demand, ie, on shore, when a company’s total landed cost analyses includes not just unit costs, but transportation, inventory, handling, duties, and financing. Firms like Sharp (the Japanese TV maker), for example, started moving manufacturing from Asia to Mexico to be closer to American customers.

3. Supply chain flexibility becomes more critical. While “dedicated manufacturing”, where each plant specializes in producing only a few items, uses economies of scale to keep manufacturing costs down, it can also result in long delivery lags and higher transportation costs. “Flexible manufacturing”, where each plant can produce most or all of a firm’s products, protects operations from today’s economic volatility and supply chain disruptions.

The article concludes “corporate planners are on the verge of a leap from low-cost manufacturing to a more regional strategy”.

Good OM Reading: Sustainability Nears the Tipping Point

Now that your Fall semester is complete and you have some time for holiday reading, we can give you a sneak preview of the upcoming MIT Sloan Management Review (Winter, 2012) article on the characteristics of companies that are profiting from sustainability practices and the factors that have driven the recent surge in sustainability adoption.The article also highlights the challenges companies face in building a business case for sustainability.

Results from this, MIT’s third annual sustainability survey, indicate that an increasing number of managers and companies are taking sustainable business practices seriously. Two-thirds of respondents said that sustainability is critically important to being competitive in today’s marketplace. And despite ongoing economic uncertainty, many companies are increasing their commitments to sustainability initiatives. In fact, 31% of respondents said their companies are profiting from sustainable business practices. Yet, it should be noted that “green” still ranks only 8th on companies’ agendas for action.

The article also points out that sustainability comes from both internal and external drivers. External factors include regulations, green score cards and other metrics, media, climate change science, resource scarcity, and consumer demand. “Consumers today have higher expectations that brands deliver sustainable products: sustainably sourced, produced and packaged, but remaining competitively priced”, says the head of sustainability at Kimberly-Clark (maker of Huggies and Kleenex).

Yet internal drivers may be more influential than external ones. “I would say the internal drivers are 80% responsible for our sustainability efforts”, states the VP of Clorox, who sees benefits relating to operating costs, revenue growth, brand integrity, and employee engagement.

This is a good article to keep handy when you are teaching Supplement 5, Sustainability.

Good OM Reading: RX for the Emergency Room

If you want to read an excellent article about issues of quality, capacity, and bottlenecks in hospitals, see OR/MS Today (Oct., 2011), for “RX for the ER”. The authors (one of whom is head of the ER at New Orleans’ Ochsner Hospital), write: “As an industry, hospitals exhibit technologic excellence in terms of diagnostic and therapeutic innovations. However, service delivery has been absent. The economic incentives to develop and sustain service delivery models that are viewed by the patient as efficient, useful, and valuable have been to a large degree nonexistent in a hospital environment”.

But things may be changing. Patients are demanding relevant information, more choice and better services. As a result, healthcare in the US is beginning to embrace the OM techniques that have made other sectors of American industry competitive. ERs are the perfect place to begin. And Ocshner Hospital had no choice but to reengineer its ER after Hurricane Katrina wiped out 70% of New Orleans’ healthcare services in 2005. ER volumes ramped up overnight to 180% of pre-hurricane averages and wait times tripled. Annual revenue loss, estimated to be $500,000 for every 1% of patients who leave prior to examination, is one factor in hospitals wishing to invest in a more efficient system.

Some of the highlights of the article: (1) ER arrivals tend to follow a known demand curve at different hours (contrary to what many administrators think), making staffing much more efficient; (2) the ER bed is the major resource in the department and it runs at more than 100% capacity a large part of the day– but 75% of patients do not need a bed and are discharged that day; (3) low risk patients do not need the services of a highly trained ER physician, and physician assistants can provide good care at 25% of the cost; and (4) registration and triage time can be reduced by 80% with lean workflow models.

This article is full of excellent graphics (10 of them) that you can use in class to make points about lean, waiting line costs and distributions, workflow, and metrics.

Good OM Reading: Analytics–The Widening Divide

Why don’t more managers embrace the business analytic tools we use in so many aspects of our OM courses? A new report by MIT Sloan Management Review (Nov.8, 2011) answers the question with a survey of 4,500 executives regarding the integration of analytics in their enterprises. The report, Analytics: The Widening Divide, concludes that cultural biases, such as the need for new management competencies and organizational resistance to new ideas –more than technological hurdles–are the primary barriers.

First, a definition of business analytics: “the use of statistical, quantitative, predictive, and other models to drive fact-based planning, decisions, execution, management, measurement, and learning. Analytics may be descriptive, predictive. or prescriptive”.

The MIT Sloan report breaks companies down into 3 categories: Transformed (heavy users), Experienced (moderate users), and Aspirational (companies least experienced in the use of business analytics). The good news is that the number of firms in the 1st two categories, who use analytics for competitive advantage, has surged by 57% in the past year. The Aspirational group’s use of analytics actually declined by 5%. Transformed organizations have set the pace in expanding use of analytics and were found to be 2.2 times more likely to substantially outperform industry peers.

The Transformed group keenly appreciates the value of precise and real-time decisions, and is 3 times more likely to focus on speed of decision-making than Aspirational firms. This means managing operations and improving output levels based on real-time supply and demand management. Inventory replenishment processes, for example, are automated and production is optimized in these companies. As a case study, the report follows McKesson, which processes 2 million hospital orders per day. McKesson does so by embedding algorithms into customer orders to manage the inventory process without human intervention.

When students ask you why analytics are important in your OM course, this report provides a ready response.

Good OM Reading: Thinking, Fast and Slow

My cousin Val, a prominent NY psychologist, just sent me a book which is slightly outside my traditional OM reading — and yet, provides wonderful insight into how managers make decisions that affect all of their operations. Titled Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giraux, 2011), Princeton Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman looks at the mental errors we all make, and asks if they can be overcome. The answer, unfortunately, is no.

When managers face uncertainty, instead of using data and statistics, they lean towards “mental shortcuts”, skipping serious analysis — and indicating that we are not nearly as rational decision makers as we would like to think. Kahneman’s series of simple experiments show that our brains use a lot of bad habits that easily lead to unnecessary risks and bad choices.

Here is one such experiment. Try it out on your students. “A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” The majority of people (including Harvard, Princeton and MIT students) answer quickly, and with confidence, that the ball costs 10 cents. This obvious answer is wrong–it’s 5 cents.

The reason: Kahneman defines 2 types of mental systems. System 1 refers to quick, automatic thought (like 10 cents for the ball). System 2 is a higher energy thought process we rely on only when we need to or want to. Since we don’t want to think rigorously and since our System 1 hates doubt and ambiguity, he points out that our intuitions are generally wrong.

In business, fund managers charge high fees to manage portfolios, yet there is almost zero correlation to performance. Professional investors routinely think they know what others don’t. Entrepreneurs typically overstate their chance of success by 25%. CEOs who hold more company stock (a sign of self-confidence) make more irresponsible decisions in acquisitions and mergers. And even homeowners have this System 1 bias. On kitchen remodels, they expect to spend about $18,500 , where the actual cost averages $39,000.

The economic implications are of Thinking are gripping.

Good OM Reading: Great By Choice

How do some companies rise to greatness, especially in a time of upheaval and economic disruption? Jim Collins’ newest book, Great by Choice, studies leadership in turbulent times. If you enjoyed Built to Last (1994) or Good to Great (2001), this is another excellent read. Starting with 20,400 companies, Collins and his coauthor cut to only seven that they could label with the moniker “10X”. These 7 were not just successful: they thrived, beating their industry indexes by at least 10 times.

My favorite of the 10Xers is Southwest Airlines, which like other carriers, faced fuel shocks, labor strife, recessions, the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and more. Generating a profit every year for 30 years while the industry lost billions and furloughed over 100,000 employees, Southwest kept an unwavering commitment to high performance, and it knew to control expansion in good years. When the company started to grow, it didn’t leave Texas for its first 8 years, and by 1996, when more than 100 cities clamored for its service, Southwest opened only 4 new locations.

What did Collins find out about 10Xers, compared to less successful peers? First, they were not more creative or visionary or charismatic or ambitious or lucky or risk-seeking or heroic. But they did have 4 core behaviors: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, high productivity, and a surprising amount of self-control, as illustrated by Southwest’s expansion approach.

The theme of Great by Choice is “the 20-mile march”. Imagine making a 3,000 mile walk from San Diego to Maine. On the 1st day you march 20 miles and make it out-of-town. On the 2nd and 3rd days, you march 20 miles. Now you reach the edge of the desert, with its 100 degree heat and would like to rest in your tent. But you keep the pace–always–regardless of snow, wind, freezing or scalding temperatures, never pushing for a 50 mile day under even the best of conditions. Your competitor starts the same day, but logs 40 miles in his excitement. He slows down on really bad days and may even hunker down in his tent for a week. Who gets to Maine first? It’s these 7 steady trekkers: Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest, and Stryker.

Good OM Reading : Once Upon a Car

If you are looking for a fast-paced, riveting story of the near demise of the US auto industry, read Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Auto Makers. Author Bill Vlasic started following GM, Ford, and Chrysler in 2008, about a year before GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy.

We attend a secret meeting between Rick Wagoner (GM’s CEO) and Bill Ford (the great grandson of Henry Ford), in which the GM team proposed a merger with Ford. Desperate to stave off bankruptcy and burning through more than $1 billion per month, GM needed Ford’s $30 billion bank account. Savings would be huge and synergy phenomenal. As GM’s vice-chairman Bob Lutz had argued, “It could be one large, enormously powerful global auto company.You could shut one proving ground, one finance department, one tax department, a bunch of plants, get rid of a lot of engineering”. But Ford was angry with GM’s arrogance in wanting to be the senior partner and would have none of it.

The overture, though, was also disturbing. If GM went bankrupt, a big part of the auto supply chain would go with it. And that would definitely hurt Ford. (You may recall that some 15 years earlier, GM won a major lawsuit against VW, only to realize that if destroyed VW, its own supply chain would be severely damaged. It settled for $100 million in cash and VW’s promise to buy a $1 billion in parts from GM per year).

To protect his flank, Ford courted the future president, Barack Obama, who was excited about Ford’s plans to create smaller, fuel-efficient cars. On the other hand, Wagoner’s outsized control of his board and his political maneuvering killed a potential partnership with Renault-Nissan. In the end, he was forced out by Obama as part of the $50 billion bailout. And as to Chrysler, we learn that it didn’t have a chance in the game. Daimler-Benz, its German owner, wanted to dump Chrysler for years and had long starved its R&D budget. UAW union head Ron Gettelfinger does not escape blame either. Outsized demands and the infamous union job bank did little to help his autoworkers.

Good OM Reading : Pfizer–The Inside Story of Revenge, Betrayal, and Power

Fortune’s cover story (Aug.15, 2011) is a wonderfully written article about a dysfunctional pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, and the palace coup that removed CEO Jeff Kindler last December. The inside view (from 42 interviews over a 4-month period) of a $68 billion company that produced such blockbusters drugs as Lipitor and Viagra is movie material. Once a Wall Street darling and corporate icon, Pfizer has tumbled into disarray, with its stock price sagging from $49 down to $18 today and its pipeline dried up. What went wrong and how is this an OM topic?

First, there is the management issue. “Its managers descended into behavior that would do Machiavelli proud. There was the ex-CEO who wouldn’t relinquish his power. There was the HR chief who divided the staff rather than uniting it. There was Kindler himself who agonized over decisions even as he second-guessed everyone else’s actions”, writes Fortune.

The real OM story, though, is R&D and new product development (Ch.5), which is the lifeline of every drug company.With 3 of its biggest drugs about to lose patent protection and face generic competition (Lipitor alone brought in a staggering $12 billion/year and loses its exclusive rights this year), investors wanted to know what Pfizer was going to do to replace them. Its immense R&D budget of $9.4 billion last year produced two major hopes. Both ended in disaster. A cholesterol drug, torcetrapib, cost $890 million to develop and produce. A late trial revealed it increased death rates over control groups– and the drug was killed 2 days later. Exubra, an insulin system, cost a $2.8 billion write-off when unhappy customers bought only $12 million of the product.

With the business model failing, the R&D budget cut to $7 billion, Pfizer laid off 1,600 researchers at its Groton ,CT, flagship site, fired CEO Kindler and the HR VP (with massive severance packages, of course). The big pharm industry is one that requires excellent management, and I think you will be interested in reading about what happens without it.

Good OM Reading: What Really Happened to Toyota?

Consumers in the US were surprised in Oct., 2009, by the 1st of a series of highly publicized recalls of Toyota vehicles. It began with 3.8 million cars brought back for uncontrolled acceleration. Over the next 4 months, 3.4 million more recalls followed for gas pedal and software glitches. Then from Feb.-Aug., 2010, 13 more recalls followed. Just as things seemed to be settling down, 2 more recalls were announced in Jan.-Feb., 2011. The total had now reached 20 million vehicles!

How could this happen to the company that shaped the modern approach to quality improvement, asks UC-Berkeley Prof. Robert Cole in his excellent article in MIT Sloan Management Review (Summer, 2011). Had auto execs all over the world “been chasing after the wrong manufacturing model”? And to what extent did the problems originate with product design and assembly and to what extent to Toyota’s manufacturing systems?

One factor Cole found was a “reverse halo effect”. Toyota buyers in 2010 had heard a barrage of negative news and became far less forgiving about minor quality flaws than previous owners. A 2nd factor was that competitors’ products were improving to the point that Toyota didn’t look as outstanding by comparison as it had in the past.

Cole’s analysis found 2 root causes for Toyota’s problems: (1)management’s ambitious plans for rapid growth (which did not focus on quality issues already arising), and (2) the increasing complexity of the actual auto product.

I think this is an article that you will enjoy reading and that you will be able to use in your OM class.

Good OM Reading: Car Guys vs. Bean Counters

If you are looking for a good read at the beach this summer, pick up Bob Lutz’s new book , Car Guys vs. Bean Counters (Penguin Group, 2011). After holding top exec positions at BMW, Chrysler, and Ford (but never reaching the CEO spot) , Lutz joined GM at its depths, in 2001, convinced he knew exactly what a car company should look like. Despite Lutz’s strongly inflated view of himself (he compares his style to Jobs, Gates, and Branson), he has written the best book about the auto industry since Iacocca, in 1984.

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters contains some fascinating views of GM during the past decade that you might want to use in your OM class. For example, Lutz writes: “The operations portion of the automobile industry has been thoroughly optimized over many decades, doesn’t vary much from one automobile company to another, and can be manged with a focus on repetitive process. It is the ‘hard’ part of the business and requires little in the way of creativity, vision, or imagination. There is little or no competitive advantage to be gained by ‘trying harder’ in procurement, manufacturing, or wholesale”. I have to wonder if Toyota and others would agree with this assessment.

What does separate the winners from the losers, according to Lusk, is the long-cycle product development process, which still takes GM about 3-1/2 years from initial idea to 1st off-the-line. In the book, he notes how GM cut corners in some ways and wasted effort in others. He makes public for the 1st time the “hider” technique GM used on interiors, where plastic corners were rounded so customers would not notice misalignments.

My favorite story is about the Outside Speaker Effectiveness Analysis Group, which rated guest lecturers who came to speak at HQ. One well-known speaker received this letter after giving a talk at a GM conference: “The five ‘outside speakers’ average scores ranged from 5.25 to 8.25. Your average was 7.35. Your standard deviation was 1.719 and ranked 2nd among the variances”. Maybe more time on OM could have saved GM from near-destruction.

Good OM Reading: Our “Big Thirst” for Water

Of the dozens of papers presented at the POMS meeting that dealt with sustainability, not one focused on the critical manufacturing resource of water. But Charles Fishman’s newly published book, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water (Free Press, 368 pp.), may very well raise our awareness of what he calls a “silent revolution” in water usage in the biggest economy in the world.

Why is this a sustainability topic worth discussing in class? Perhaps because of a 2007 UN study predicting: “Major cities in the West, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, may have to be abandoned as badlands”? Las Vegas, which has one of the biggest water shortages in the country, now pays residents $40,000 an acre to take out their lawns and put in rocks and local plants.

The golden age of water, as Fishman calls it, was the last 100 years, where we lived in a “kind of aquatic paradise…our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap”. He writes: “We don’t take it for granted because we don’t notice it enough to take it for granted”. But the new scarcity of water may take us “from the golden age of water to the revenge of water”. Water is the key ingredient in making computer chips, blue jeans, iPhones, kleenex, rice, and steel. A 2-liter Coke takes 5 liters of water to produce. The population increase by a factor of 4 during the past century was marked by a water consumption increase by a factor of 7. Here in Florida, we use 50% of our water in gardening!

The good news is that we getting the message. US farmers use 15% less water than 30 years ago, with a 70% bigger yield. GE and IBM are not only reducing water usage, by have created new divisions to teach towns and companies how to manage it.

You can listen to Fishman’s NPR interview at npr.org.

Good OM Reading: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution

It was clear that Wal-Mart was taking a leadership stand in sustainability when we wrote the Supplement 5 case study Environmental Sustainability at Wal-Mart 2 years ago. However, an excellent book called Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution, by Edward Humes (Harper Business, 265 pages), has just been published that will bring the case alive to your students. If you are to read one book on the company that is leading this unlikely second industrial revolution, this would be it.

That’s because Wal-Mart, long the target of environmentalists who hate its big-box footprint, and others who feel it has destroyed small town businesses by the 1,000’s, has created nothing less than a green revolution. And as we see in Force of Nature, it is spreading this unprecedented makeover worldwide. But the real story behind the changes at one of the world’s least earth-friendly companies is when river-guide turned consultant, Jib Ellison, enters CEO Lee Scott’s office.

Ellison singlehandedly persuades Scott that sustainability isn’t just for tree huggers–that it really meant eliminating waste and saving money. Hitting Wal-Mart at just the right moment, when it was plagued by bad PR and a slew of lawsuits, Ellison convinced the firm’s execs that building sustainability into the business would create a powerful competitive edge. Wal-Mart did not embark, as the author says, on this course out of a sense of doing-good, but started with the attitude that it would give a PR boost…and also be profitable. It also was meant to appeal to a new generation of female shoppers who would leave for Target if Wal-Mart did not embrace sustainability.

Just a few of the recent changes: reducing packaging sizes (saving $3.4 billion a year while reducing trash), installing electric generators in refrigerated trucks (so they don’t have to idle overnight), donating 127 million pounds of food (that would otherwise be destroyed) to food banks, cutting printouts at stores (and saving 350 million pieces of paper and $20 million), making organic, earth-friendly, and natural products widely available, and forcing 100,000 manufacturers who supply products Wal-Mart sells to become more sustainable!

Good OM Reading: Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru

If there was one article you could ask your students to read at the beginning of the OM semester, it would be this lead piece in Businessweek (May 9,2011). The theme is that OM innovations at fast food restaurants like Taco Bell rival those at any factory in the world. Written from the view of the drive-thru window (which generates about 70% of fast food sales), the article lets you overview your course with issues of productivity (Ch.1), technology and process design in services (Ch.7), layout (Ch.9), and time & motion studies (Ch.10). The story also comes with a 1-1/2 minute video which the students will enjoy as well.

Here is a quote from the 5-page reading: “Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counter argument to any notion that the US has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who overseas 3 dozen workers, devices schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product”.

The firm’s CEO concludes, “At Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day”.
Adds a former Wendy’s VP for OM, “The most advanced operational thinking in the world is going on in the back” of a fast food restaurant. Wendy’s is rated as the fastest brand (an amazing 134 seconds per drive-thru vehicle), but Taco Bell comes out 1st ranked overall with an average time of 164 seconds and a 93.1% accuracy rate.

This article describes the restaurant layout (the topic of our Global Company Profile in Ch.9), new technologies in the industry, bottlenecks, staffing issues, and much more. It is a perfect lead-in to the exciting topic we teach.